Jonah Raskin

In a recent article for the San Francisco Examiner, the free thrice-a-week newspaper, critic Max Blue argued that art was dying in SF. That news should have come as no surprise to readers and citizens from Pacific Heights to the Mission District. After all, the city itself is dying from the inside … Continue Reading

Unlike his predecessors in the field of California literature — Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Frank Norris — Jack London was born in San Francisco. 1876, the year of his birth, was also the anniversary of the centenary of the United States, the nation to which he owed his unalloyed allegiance. His … Continue Reading

I never wanted to be a hippie, not while I lived in New York in the sixties. Hippies were unkempt, if not dirty. They didn’t work and they only spoke gibberish, you dig man? When I arrived in San Francisco, though, the hippie seemed to be a different creature; he or she had a job in construction or … Continue Reading

In January of 1969, the Yippies, a.k.a. The Youth International Party, called for an “Inhoguration” in Washington, DC, to protest Richard Nixon’s victory at the polls. In those days, cops were “pigs” and politicians were “hogs.” This Yippie Inhoguration was meant to be a reverse inauguration: … Continue Reading

You’ve no doubt heard the slogan “Drugs ‘R’ Us.” I have. By 1960s standards, I was a modest druggie. I never went over the edge. But I knew that I was drugs and drugs were me. Case in point: I met Dr. Timothy Leary a handful of times during the last few decades of the twentieth century and dropped … Continue Reading

Cities get the writers they deserve, and writers get the cities they need. London with Charles Dickens and Zadie Smith. New York with Edith Wharton and Gore Vidal. Los Angeles with Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion. Tokyo and Haruki Murakami. Istanbul and Orhan Pamuk. And on and on. But cities … Continue Reading

M.F.K. Fisher, known to friends and family members as Mary Frances, boasted that she wrote her books in “invisible ink” and that she had “invisible maps” of places where she had made her home, like Aix-en-Provence. I didn’t catch up with her until she settled in Glen Ellen, California, an invisible … Continue Reading

If you were alive and paying attention to the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as I was, you had to have loved Abbie Hoffman. Abbie was the true avatar of the American cultural revolution, the man who stole the spotlight from Jerry Rubin (who then quit the Yippies, became a Yuppie, and went … Continue Reading

The English word “fugitive,” which has been around for centuries, was adopted as a noun and as an adjective in the 14th century from the Latin adjective fugitiuus, which comes from the verb fugere, which means to flee. Notorious 14th century criminals include Adam the Leper, Eustace Folville and … Continue Reading

As Oscar Wilde and T. S. Eliot both wrote, “Talent borrows, genius steals.” To write her most recent novel, Demon Copperhead, her tenth in the past 35 years, Barbara Kingsolver didn’t exactly steal, but she turned for inspiration to Charles Dickens, whom she calls her “genius friend.” She … Continue Reading